Interest is high for what this may mean for the site. There have been suggestions all over the place - decreased mission,increased mission or even a sale of part of the campus.
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This was the end game at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-90's. Bob Palmer was brought in by the Board to spin stuff off, shut lines of business down, lay people off, and make the company attractive to sell. Compaq eventually bought Digital for the consulting services business (which in the 90's seemed of great strategic value to them), quickly killed the remaining Alpha hardware development, and HP eventually did away with all the software development after HP bought Compaq. Many jobs lost, much good technology killed.
And Bob Palmer walked away with a big pay-day.
To 3klg,
When will Bain start to clean up the management bloat?
That's what everyone still working here wants to see.
Office Space
Peter: And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now
3kxb. Ka Ching. You are seeing the game plan!!! Why would you partner with Bain??? To break up the company and to extract value. The plan is so far along, that the break up must occur even if a new CEO wants to save the IBM name. Way too much talent has been shed. The business plan for the “new” IBM requires a complete “rethinking” of how IBM will approach the marketplace. Annuity, as a service, cloud, ip revenue is the way forward. Everything else must go. Bain will take it, and milk it into the ground. The new IBM will make very little HW wise, but will farm where they have a monopoly, and exploit the IP that they have developed along the way. Transitioning to cloud/as a service just eliminates the manpower overhead.
Ginni's last task is to sell IBM, and then gets a huge bonus from the board because she sold IBM successfully.
IBM failed at cloud services like Dell EMC, HPE, VMware, Oracle, and other mid-tier legacy-ish tech company. They should focus on being a bridge between private to public clouds and leave public clouds to AWS, Google, and Microsoft and large legacy telecommunications companies.
Ginni should have been fired a long time ago she lacks subject matter expertise in running a tech business and the leadership skills to plan for the future.
Ginni and some IBM cronies were at our site several years ago and they had no clue what we even did there. She literally asked while on stage in front of us, so what do you guys do here?
I remember the following line from her:
If you are not on the IBM cloud then you will not be an IBMer too much longer <<
That made everyone crap their pants because not one account was/is on IBM cloud at our center.
Now that was like 5 yrs ago and still no cloud support in the corn belt that I am aware of.
I would say IBM cloud is a bust or this location will be a bust soon.
Customer sentiment:
"Softlayer was a good product until IBM bought them"
Rumor has it that "the newly promoted NA CMO, former RTP colocation cheerleader and vocal supporter of shoulder-to-shoulder workspaces" will take her boss on a site tour with several videographers in tow to include social media reps. Look for links to these videos on Friday at facebook.com/IBM/ and facebook.com/ibmsux/
You never see Big Cheeses working shoulder to shoulder, do you?
Ginni will be hosted next Thursday by the newly promoted NA CMO, former RTP colocation cheerleader and vocal supporter of shoulder-to-shoulder workspaces. She's moved into an office in another building away from the other marketers.
There has been no announcement to date of this promotion (or the move away from colocated space).
It’s the Redhat tour. IBM and Redhat are getting closer
Ginni came to visit our site a year or so ago, there were similar rumours at the time. We hoped it was the "goodbye" tour. Nothing came of it. She's probably just coming to feign an interest in the company.